Organization of the Cingulate Cortex

Efficient evaluation and monitoring of actions and outcomes are a key feature of primates' efficient adaptive cognition. Deficits in evaluating one's own actions and their consequences is a key feature of prominent disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD), schizophrenia, and anxiety. The Investigators know that these evaluative processes implicate medial structures of the brain that are related both to old limbic functions and to more recently evolved higher executive functions. Brain potentials related to performance monitoring have attracted a lot of interest in cognitive neuroscience but also in the clinical domain because they appear to be altered in different neurological or psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, OCD, or anxiety, and could become biomarkers of pathologies. But the neural sources of these markers are not fully determined and are currently highly debated. In addition, our work suggests that non pathological factors, such as normal morphological cortical variations, could affect those markers. Understanding performance monitoring, acting directly on medial cortex, or using electrophysiological markers in clinic are thus currently problematic and challenging. This is mostly because structure-function relationships in the medial wall are ill defined for historical, conceptual, and methodological reasons. Importantly, although individual variability of brain morphology impedes precise assessment of structure function relationships, this variability is almost never taken into account. EEG-Feedback aims to resolve these issues by evaluating the consequences of individual variability in cingulate cortex morphology on 1) surface EEG markers of feedback monitoring and 2) functional connectivity patterns thanks to resting-state fMRI.